What am I going to do today, Friday January 8?

Just like anyone else in our fast paced world of American on the Internet, I have many things tugging for my attention and too little time to do them all.

Professors potentially have many task masters, and being a blogging professor means asking for a never-ending work load.

The purpose of today’s blog piece is to show you just how busy and pressured is the life of a blogging accounting professor.

What could I do today [it is only 8:00 a.m. as I publish this post]?

Attend a campus wide all faculty meeting. The College president is speaking about something, from 9:15-10:20. If I go, it means getting showered/dressed, and driving 9 miles over to campus, finding parking, sitting through meeting whenI want todo other things, then recovering and focusing my attention where I can leverage my core competencies. Already sent e-mail to dean asking if I can blow it off. [He said no, so I went.]

Attend to some administrative tasks on campus. Must get modified parking sticker. Must get some drivers and other things installed on my work horse laptop. ITS means well here, but I’m so busy it is easy to put them off. I’m too busy for this today, but it does need to get done sometime.

Devote the day to preparing for classes next week. A new semester has started, and there are new topical chapters to cover. Organizing my approach to the chapter, writing mini-chapters, writing new homework problems, etc. It could take 50 hours, and that is just for today. Students pay $30,000 for me to create the best-for-them educational experience. Am thinking about delaying this until Saturday night, as I again have nothing social to do.

Respond to a request for analysis on an issue presented confidentially by an accounting group.

A continuation of my worldview thoughts. It would be a response to the student who initiated my first thoughts on writing about worldviews.

Responding to someone who asks how to how blogging works (they want to get started as a blogger)

Writing a documentary-style post on the process of writing a blogging piece. The final product would be a post, and the post about writing it.

Write a blog piece on some of the problems associated with the current structure of accounting education. Francine McKenna put out something yesterday or the day before, and it deserves someone else chiming in.

Just tracked down copies of Daniel Thornton’s summary of principal-agent theory. I don’t have a copy of Jensen-Meckling, but I remember it well enough. So, could blog about those, and then apply it to the discussion on purpose of auditors into today’s conception of market regulation and financial accounting/auditing regulation.

Continuing on my thoughts from yesterday, when I published piece on Economic Consequences and the Political Nature of Accounting Standard Setting. There’s much more. The person who prompted my writing in the first place has asked for me to further develop it.

Extend thoughts from yesterday’s piece to writing about implications for the GAAP-IFRS debate. I’ve thought about various approaches. The current model for financial reporting is sucky (and sucky would be in the blog post title), sucks in so many ways. Why is there such a push for institutionalizing such sucky accounting? It will just make it more difficult in the long run to make improvements.

Just why is today’s accounting model sucky? Pretty much because it is based on accounting for merchants. Merchants buy and sell. In order to record something, there must be an exchange transaction. In today’s world, we have many unrecorded assets: human, environmental, intellectual property. And, in today’s fast-paced IT-enabled world, there is pressure for making everything market-value driven. It is simply impossible to account for everything today given some of the assumptions inherent in Pacioli’s model. We need something else. Well,then, WTF are we ready to cement into stone such a sucky model? We need to have an environment with several competing accounting models until we finally get something that will work well in the 21st century.

Writing a piece on where are the professors? A reader has asked this. There are only 20 accounting professors who are blogging about their work. Some are commentary-type blogs on current events. Some deal with educational issues. But there are 3,000-4,000 accounting professors with a mandate to get published. I can testify that publishing in blogs means entering a fast-paced environment of being releveant to the world. The world could benefit from seeing professor’s work, hot off the keyboard. I benefit greatly from immediate feedback from readers. Where are the professors? Their old outlet channels are obsolete. Journals are like newspapers, obsolete with financial problems and declining readership. Professor have trouble in tracking down newest work (databases of articles are prohibitively expensive and schools just don’t invest in them).

Yikes, I need about 200 hours, just for today.

The purpose of today’s blog piece has been to show you a little about my life, that of a blogging accounting professor.